Po-Hao Chi is an interdisciplinary practitioner from Taiwan working across music, technology, and art. His practice stems from a fascination with boundaries and guidelines and associating diversities from observations in daily life.
Po-Hao’s recent research is about agencies and collaborative capacities between humans and artifacts with evolving connectivity. His studio, Zone Sound Creative, is a cultural agent that bridges people and encourages dialogues across disciplines. Ongoing projects include 3000 Years Among Microbes and Plastic Soup, created in collaboration with artists/researchers from the MIT community and supported with a grant from the Taiwan Ministry of Culture for techno-art and international networking development.
Po-Hao Chi holds a SMACT degree from ACT, a Masters in music from Goldsmiths College, and a B.A. in economics from National Taiwan University. Previously, he worked as a musician/songwriter in the music industry.
Po-Hao is also the first place winner of the 2021 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts.
Some of his recent projects have included:
Performative Aramono
(Interactive installation presented in 2020 at Chung Hsing Cultural and Creative Park, Taiwan, in collaboration with Earthing Way. Interactive design by Zone Sound Creative.)
Performative Aramono is a participatory installation that integrates historical origins and creative technologies. An acoustic environment that invites viewers to join and play with others, the project utilizes the sound of daily essential objects to explore sonic memories.
Created in cooperation with Earthing Way, a business dedicated to promoting Taiwanese daily essentials in Tau-Tiu-Tiann, the notion of Aramono—the original state of objects without decoration and polishing—is extended. The exhibition investigates sensory experience, memories, and aural events in everyday life. It explores the possibilities of houseware objects in the context of visual culture, to extend the viewer’s imagination.
After scanning a QR code, participants use an interactive webpage to communicate with the installation through their personal mobile devices, triggering audible and visible feedback. By transferring everyday essentials into a musical interface, participants and objects co-create a resonant sound field by means of the signal. This interactive system symbolizes the combination of different groups and also the convergence of group memory, which hopes to bring a unique experience to everyone with daily essentials and their resonances.
Virtual Confinement
(Participatory WebVR Experiment, 2020. Cardboard headset, projections. Co-produced by Mengtai Zhang and Po-Hao Chi, with interactive programming by Lo Jo-Yu. This project was supported by Transmedia Storytelling Initiative at MIT.)
Virtual Confinement is a project derived from the history of Internet addiction treatments in China since the 2000s. It portrays people who found themselves locked in a single room without an exit. The WebVR environment is set-up to recreate Tao Ran’s adaptation of Morita therapy in the Internet addiction camp, which routinely forced “Internet addicts” to stay alone and write in a diary to correct their minds and behaviors.
VR cardboard headsets provide the audience means to interact with the installation and each other via collective writings on a shared diary.
In this project, “addiction” becomes a metaphor of connectivity, which implies the phenomenon of pathologizing Internet relationships, representing a “trouble” set up by ourselves. It is an experience of solitude on the Web without Internet browsing, as a response to Sherry Turkle’s words: “We’re getting used to a new way of being alone together.”
Harmony in Precarity
(Wearable musical device composed of plastic pipe, PVC, and electronics. Musical interface, sonification program. 2021. Created in collaboration with Gu Mi Studio.)
Harmony in Precarity is an augmented acoustic device that explores unfamiliar moments in microgravity. The rootless state in parabolas is a metaphor and generative method for “precarity,” which is defined as “depending on the will or pleasure of another” and comes from the Latin for prayer. Precarity is everywhere, it seems. Perhaps it is, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes, “the condition of our time.” It is also the defining feature of an entire class of people, the precariat. Po-Hao Chi regards the precarious spatiality in microgravity as an emerging form of sonic thought and imagination associated with space exploration.
The acoustic device functions both as a wearable medium that reacts to the operator’s body dynamic and as an autonomous device with weightlessness. It simulates a “rainstick,” an ancient musical instrument used by natives of South America to summon wind and rain and avoid drought. With multiple stick-piezo connected to extended springs inside plastic tubes as a contact microphone, the system captures piezoelectric signals when particles hit and transmits vibrations and collisions of fragmented debris inside the device to a customized sonification program during weightless periods.
